Why John Tory lost the 2007 provincial election,
John Laschinger was a young IBM salesman in 1971 when he met then Ontario premier Bill Davis. Shortly after, Laschinger joined the Big Blue Machine preparing the way for the Progressive Conservatives’ majority that October. Since then, Laschinger has buil
It is conventional wisdom that [John] Tory lost the 2007 election to Dalton McGuinty mainly because of the Conservatives’ new policy of support for public funding for faithbased schools. Not entirely! There were a number of factors at play, but in my opinion, backed up by our nightly tracking research, none was more important than the lack of discipline in our team.
An analysis of the party research conducted prior to and during the 2007 election campaign revealed a number of shortcomings. We went into the campaign facing various challenges. These included a relatively low level of desire for change amongst the electorate; a lower level of support from females, visible minorities, and residents of urban Ontario; and a low level of secondchoice support from voters intending to cast their ballots for the NDP or the Green party. However, a major factor in our 2007 defeat was the lack of discipline during the last 10 days of the campaign exhibited by two of our candidates who were both sitting MPPs.
First, the faith-based funding issue. Ontario was, and continues to be, the only province in Canada that fully funds a Catholic education while not providing funding to other religious schools.
In 2003, then premier Ernie Eves and his treasurer, Jim Flaherty, introduced a $500 tax credit for any taxpayer who had a child attending a religious or independent school in Ontario. When Eves was defeated in 2003 by Liberal Dalton McGuinty, the tax credit was retroactively cancelled.
During the 2004 Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership race to select a successor to Eves, John Tory, Frank Klees and Jim Flaherty were the major contenders. Each of these candidates had a policy position on faith-based education. Each of them was vague about how he would address this issue, but address it each would, if elected leader.
During the leadership campaign I told Tory that this vague promise could prove problematic in the next provincial election. Regardless, he included the policy in his leadership platform. Tory won the leadership on the second ballot, defeating Flaherty.
As campaign director for the party in the election that followed, I had a number of early challenges, not the least of which was to ensure that Tory could win a seat in the Ontario legislature. That took some time, but in March 2005 he won a byelection in Ernie Eves’ old seat of DufferinPeel-Wellington- Grey (renamed Dufferin-Caledon in 2007). However, the principal challenge was to find a faith-based education policy position that we could include in the party’s election platform.
In early 2007 I asked Tory if we could run our campaign saying only that a Conservative government would deal with this issue once it had been elected. He said no. He had made a promise to party members during the leadership, and he intended to honour it. He said he believed that politicians should keep their word — something that Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty was not known for. (In the 2003 election McGuinty had promised not to raise taxes. Four weeks after his election, he introduced a new health-care premium — a tax by any other name.) Tory was convinced that Ontarians would vote for a straight-talking leader, and he was anxious to present himself in that light.
When the issue heated up in early September of the 2007 campaign, Tory explained his rationale: it was a policy based on fairness and a determination to build a more inclusive public education system. “I am actually being honest with people and taking a principled stand which is tough to do but right,” he said, adding, “If I changed course now and said I had made an error — which I do not believe I have — that would either indicate weak leadership in not thinking something through or weak leadership which flip-flops at the first sign of trouble.”
We asked Alister Campbell, a very smart policy adviser to former premier Mike Harris, to come up with some options for Tory to consider. Alister did his part, and we then used focus groups to help evaluate the choices.
The choice that resonated best with voters and campaign personnel was to provide funding for faith-based institutions provided they met two key conditions: their curriculum had to be approved by the province; and they had to be part of the provincial school system and be associated with a public or separate school board.
We created the platform document and presented it to a full caucus meeting along with all of the other campaign policies. Overall, the reaction was positive. We prepared for the campaign launch.
However, a comment from an older man in a focus group held in Peterborough stuck in my mind as we organized our campaign. After listening to a description of our faith-based policy, he said, “Let me get this straight, what they are proposing is to pay Muslim kids to make bombs in the basement of the schools. Is that correct?” As the moderator of focus groups, my role is not to answer questions, only to ask questions. I said nothing, but I recall my stomach turning at the comment.
During the summer months leading up to the anticipated October election, our candidates started to report negative reactions they were receiving to our policy. Published polls during that period showed the electorate was divided. The results seemed to vary widely from one polling firm to the next. Some polls showed opposition to the policy as high as 65 per cent and support at 32 per cent, while other polls showed support at 48 per cent and opposition at 44 per cent. Our internal polling showed 55 per cent opposition and 45 per cent support. At the same time, both public polls and our internal polls showed a statistical tie in voter intentions between ourselves and the Liberals, at 38 per cent each.
We decided in late July that we needed to release further details about the faith-based school funding policy to address the concerns of some of our candidates.
On July 23, Tory and Frank Klees, our opposition education critic, announced that if we were elected, former premier Bill Davis would lead a commission to research and provide recommendations for the inclusion of faith-based schools in Ontario’s public school system. This would include identifying best practices in other provinces. The announcement, however, did little to reduce the angst of our candidates.
The campaign officially started on Sept. 10, and our school funding proposal instantly became the No. 1 issue. McGuinty and the Liberals seized advantage of the situation. Each day for most of the first two weeks, McGuinty visited a public school to extol the virtues of the public system and to draw (negative) attention to our policy. He understood the racist undertones behind the opposition of many of those opposed to faith-based school funding, the kind of feelings that had been expressed openly by the man from the Peterborough focus group, and he aggressively drove that point home every day.
We held weekly teleconferences with all of our candidates during the campaign to share information, in- cluding research findings. Faithbased funding occupied much of the conversation. Hand-holding followup calls occurred each week.
Despite the fuss, our provincewide voter support held up. On Sept. 13, Ipsos Reid reported the horse race as Liberals 39 per cent and PCs 37 per cent — a statistical tie. Our own internal polling on Sept. 18-19 found the same thing: a statistical tie with Liberals at 37 per cent and PCs at 35 per cent.
On Sept. 20, the first and only televised TV debate was held, and Tory acquitted himself very well. Most independent observers thought he won the debate.
The provincewide polling results on Sept. 22-23 again showed no change in voter support — Liberals 37 per cent, PCs 35 per cent. And our own polling results on Sept. 24, four days after the debate, showed that at 31 per cent we were statistically tied with the Liberals (who stood at 32 per cent) as being the party with the most momentum in the campaign.
But trouble was brewing within our own ranks.
The week before, our candidate in Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, MPP Bill Murdoch, had contacted us and said he was going to publicly abandon the faith-based policy. He said he was going to lose his seat over it. I sent Paul Rhodes, our war room chief and a person relatively close to Murdoch, up to his riding to talk to him. Rhodes returned and reported little progress.
I commissioned a poll in Murdoch’s riding that week. It showed that Murdoch would win his riding by more than 20 per cent. Rhodes provided Murdoch with the poll results. He was not swayed.
On Monday morning, Sept. 24, Bill Murdoch announced in a media session that he was not supportive of the policy. Like a lemming, MPP Garfield Dunlop from Simcoe North followed suit three hours later.
The voter intention numbers did not change that evening. Neither did the party with the most-momentum numbers.
The next day, on Sept. 25, our polling again showed no change in voter intentions, but we started to slide in the standings of the party with the most momentum. Over the next five nights, we went from being tied with the Liberals in momentum to seeing the Liberals take a10-per-cent lead — 35 to 25 per cent.
My experience with political polling has demonstrated that when the momentum numbers drop for a party, the voter intention numbers will soon follow suit. That is exactly what happened to us. By Oct. 1 our voter intention numbers had dropped significantly: the Liberals now stood at 37 per cent and the PCs at 31per cent.
On Oct. 1, we made the decision to announce that, if elected, we would put the policy on faith-based funding to a free vote in the legislature. We knew that this would be perceived as weak leadership, and indeed Tory’s personal favourability numbers sagged over the next nine days. But making this announcement was the lesser of two evils. The Murdoch/ Dunlop disease was threatening to spread to other candidates.
By the end of that week we were 10 per cent down, with the Liberals at 40 per cent and the PCs at 30. On election night, Oct. 10, the Liberals won a majority government with 42 per cent of the vote; we ended up with 32 per cent.
Despite insisting that their seats were at risk, Bill Murdoch was elected in Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound with a plurality of 14 per cent, and Garfield Dunlop’s advantage was 19 per cent. John Tory lost Don Valley West to Kathleen Wynne. Dalton McGuinty was returned to Queen’s Park with a majority government thanks mainly to two MPPs who had never heard, did not believe, or could not understand Ronald Reagan’s dictum.